A father in Haiti works to find 10-year-old daughter's body in rubble

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Erick Joseph says he wants to see his little girl again and that is why he does what he does.

"One last time," he says. "Before she is gone."

But Ericka Joseph already is gone. The 10-year-old is dead. What her father means is that he wishes to see her one last time before she is buried in one of the mass graves opened in this city. Otherwise her broken body may not be found for weeks, maybe months. Maybe never.

Matt Rainey/The Star-LedgerErick Joseph, right, hired several men for $150 Haitian dollars per day ($15 USD) to dig for his daughter amongst the rubble of his house in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. His daughter, his sister in-law and her two daughters are under the rubble from the earthquake, which struck Haiti last week. "I want to see her face one last time," he says, then he goes back to what he has been doing for days. Scraping at the remains of a house with a shovel. Or, sometimes, he will take the small sledge hammer from one of the other men on top of the pile of rubble and hammer crazily at a concrete slab.

"I want to see her. I have nothing else," he says after he is exhausted from hammering and his neighbor takes back the sledge hammer. All the father’s pounding has opened up only a small crack, but the others stick their shovel blades into the crack and try to pry it open.

In the debris, the men have found some things in the house Erick shared with his daughter, his mother-in-law, and his sister-in-law. They have found shoes and pieces of a dining room table. A smashed television, lots of plastic flowers, mostly blue, and socks.

There is a pile of pretty clothing, sheer pink and white and green, remarkably free of dust. It has been collected by three women who sit at the edge of the pile and dab tissues at their eyes, but say nothing. One says they are "famille," -- family -- but they do not wish to speak further.

Someone hands Joseph a set of keys he has found in the rubble. He is about to put them in his pocket, then looks at them and says to the man who found them, "What do I do with keys?"

Joseph is helped by six other men. Sometimes, as Joseph just did, they work furiously, if futilely, pounding at the unexpected sepulcher that holds Ericka. Sometimes, they just stand there and watch the man they have come to help.

And there are other times when something else happens.

"Hey, stop," Joseph suddenly yells in Creole. He is shouting at a man who has been helping him but has slid down the pile of rocks and hoisted a fine wooden door over his head. He runs away, lost in the crowds and chaotic traffic on Delmas Road.

Matt Rainey/The Star-LedgerEric Joseph (background, left, seated with hat) and several neighbors he's hired to dig for his daughter amongst the rubble of his house in Port-au-Prince, Haiti."He has taken the door," says Alcide Louissiant, a man who describes himself as a neighbor. His mother Dulcine lives in Newark but he has not seen her for years.

Then what seemed a poignant picture of neighbors helping neighbors in the midst of tragedy begins to look a little different. These are neighbors, yes, in the sense they live nearby but some are here for reasons more to do with greed than compassion.

Joseph says: "I called the police when the house fell down" in French -- "tomber" a word heard frequently here, along with "mort," "dead.

"I called for an ambulance. But no one ever came."

Up the street, the Delmas police station has collapsed, killing 50 officers and eight prisoners. Across the way, a school has collapsed, and while police officers there say no children are inside, no one really knows.

Throughout Port-au-Prince, the hunt for the lost goes, many trapped under piles of concrete, just like Joseph’s little girl.

Ericka Joseph means a lot, a whole life’s worth, to Erick, but in the calculus of the worst earthquake ever to hit Haiti, she cannot mean all that much to anyone else.

So, her father could not persuade the police to come. When neighbors did not show up on their own, Erick gathered as much money as he could and went out into the street and hired idle men --- there are many in a place where unemployment rates reach 80 percent -- to come to what remained of his house and dig and hammer and pry.

But some men made calculations of their own. Like knowing an intact wooden door on a world of concrete is worth more than what Joseph could pay. So that man who stole the door took out his fee in kind.

"Yes, they are scavengers," said Louissaint. "But remember, they need things, too. Everyone here is poor."

At the end of the day, the men have removed very little of the concrete. It gets dark, and neighbors walk away. Joseph says they will not come back.

"I do not have any more money, says Ericka’s father. "I will not see her again."